“I’m, I’m lookin’ for both’a ya’ll,” I said, my language devolving all the way back to my childhood, “but not in the same place.”
Mouse’s smile broadened, while Christmas’s eyes got tight. At least they were reacting according to their natures.
“You been drinkin’, Easy?” Mouse asked.
“How’s Easter Dawn?” Christmas wanted to know.
“She’s fine,” I said. “Down at Jackson Blue’s house with Feather and Jesus and them.”
“I left her with you,” the ex–Green Beret said. In any other state of mind I would have been worried about the threat in his voice.
“Yeah. Yes, you did. You left her with me with not even a note. Not even one word to tell her why you brought her there. Here I am with a child worried about her father, and he don’t have the decency to let on what he’s up to or when he’ll be back.”
The muscle in Black’s shoulders and back was so dense that it looked like a pack he toted. This mass increased with his anger, but I didn’t care.
“I told you he was gonna do sumpin’, Chris,” Mouse said. “Easy ain’t no pussy-ass soldier gonna wait for your orders.”
“Are you here for Mouse or for me?” Christmas asked.
“Faith Laneer is dead,” I said, answering all questions he might have had.
“Dead how?”
“Slaughtered like a hog in her own living room by a man named Sammy Sansoam.”
I hadn’t known Christmas for long, but our relationship had been consecrated in blood, my blood. So I knew him on a very intimate level. He had never shown a moment of weakness or uncertainty in the time I had known him, and I was pretty sure that he rarely radiated anything but strength.
But when he heard how Faith had died, he went to one of the chairs and sat down. It was an eloquent, soldierly sign of surrender.
“But you here for me, not him,” Mouse said.
“I was lookin’ for you ’cause of Pericles Tarr,” I said. “Etta wanted me to find you because the cops think you killed Tarr.”
“Killed him? I freed him and then made him rich. I’m his goddamned Abraham Lincoln. Forty thousand acres and a whole herd’a mules.”
“Yeah. I found that out and told Etta, but then this thing with Sansoam happened and I wanted you to come help me take care of it.”
The gleam in Raymond’s eye almost made me smile. He recognized the murder in my soul like a long-lost brother.
“You wanna kill the mothahfuckah,” he stated.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
And that was it. As far as Mouse was concerned, we were ready to roll. For a man to die somewhere, all I had to do was ask.
“How you get messed up with Sansoam?” Christmas asked. His voice was low and empty.
I told him about my meeting with the soldiers at his house and about the break-in at mine. Then I related my last sighting of Sammy, driving away from Faith’s home.
“How could a man do somethin’ like that to that beautiful young woman?” Raymond asked.
I hadn’t wondered about Raymond getting together with Christmas to take care of the soldiers on his trail. They were friends and they were remorseless killers; the combination spoke for itself. What bothered me was that question, though. Killing had taken an odd turn in Raymond’s mind. Would he understand killing an ugly woman or an old one? And then I wondered . . .
“How would Sammy know where Faith was?”
Christmas looked up.
“I mean,” I continued, “Mouse wouldn’t let out a secret if you cut off his arm. He wouldn’t tell anybody and neither would you, Chris. And I know you put her somewhere where nobody could have trailed her. So it had to be somethin’ Sammy came upon.”
“I left a brochure under one of the table legs. . . .”
“No. I found that,” I said. “That’s how I got to Faith in the first place. No one else saw it, and you killed those men came in on you.”
A crease appeared in Black’s forehead. His light brown eyes shone like those of any man or animal surprised in leisure.
“She had a child,” he said. “A boy.”
It bothered me that Faith hadn’t told me about her child. I didn’t know why.
“Where?” I asked.
“Child didn’t tell this man Sammy where she was,” Raymond said reasonably. He wanted to get on the road to
